Manifold
by Saboteuse
Summary: Remember the guy from TAS who is given a passing mention? Who got put in a dungeon because of his calabi-yau manifold? This is his story. Bad summary...take a look?
1. Chapter One

_It reminded her of a certain abominable heresy, whose author was now deservedly languishing in the dungeons of the Consistorial Court. He had suggested that there were more spatial dimensions than the three familiar ones, that on a very small scale, there were up to seven or eight other dimensions, but that they were impossible to examine directly. He had even constructed a model to show how they might work, and Mrs. Coulter had seen the object before it was exorcised and burned. Folds within folds, corners and edges both containing and being contained: its inside was everywhere and its outside was everywhere else. The Clouded Mountain affected her in a similar way...**The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman**_

"Rhyalise!" Everett Habor's cries were muffled by the thick cement walls of the inquisitorial cell."Rhya! Rhyalise, my Rhyalise, Rhya!"

The inquisitor's robes were too dark to be a felicitous red. They were decorated with black trim and gave him an imperious and frightening air, especially when they were swept into attitudes of cruelty and contempt. His spotted hyena dæmon raised her hackles and made low, threatening noises which permeated the air in shades of fog and poison. Nearby, a gaunt-faced young alethiometrist-friar scribbled upon a sheaf of paper, occasionally staring fixedly at what looked like a gold and crystal compass. Every time the man cried out, the friar's whole body gave an involuntary twitch, and his frog dæmon darted inside the comfort of his monastic robes. His name was Pavel Rasek, and his dæmon was terrified of what was happening to the dæmon of the accused. Fra Pavel gritted his teeth and focused at the needle spinning underneath its crystalline lid. He must become accustomed to this sort of thing if he was to become an able member of the Church's Consistorial Court.

"Recant!" The inquisitor spat. The hyena dæmon crouched at his feet, her body coiled like a spring. "Recant your heretical expositions, or else suffer the consequences!" In one hand he shook a bunch of paper which was bound together, covered in faded black type; in the other he clenched a most extraordinary little model. It was made of celluloid, and looked like an infinite and impossible knot. It was the universe...

Everett Habor was suddenly racked by great shuddering gasps; he clutched at his heart, his face contorted with pain. His pale brown hair was ravaged, and the spectacles framing his grey eyes were askew. He huddled against the unyielding cement corner of the cell, his arms wrapped around his thin frame, his hand pressed against his heart as though he were trying in vain to keep something inside.

The inquisitor waited ferociously, his cold eyes directed piercingly towards the accused. Pavel Rasek stole a glance at the tortured Scholar and wished he hadn't; his dæmon went into a fresh bout of fright, burrowing deeper into his robes.

In the corridor outside, two scrivener-friars negotiated with a large steel cage. Inside was Rhyalise, the Scholar's owl dæmon. Her eyes were the most intense part of her; within their pale amber depths was contained wisdom and exceptional intellect, but at present they radiated primal, life-deep desperation. Every feather stood on end; every inch of her, claw and wing and beak, was fighting to get out of this steel prison. "Everett!" she shrieked. She flung her grey-brown-tawny wings against the bars of the cage. Down feathers floated through the air.

The Scholar felt the impact of feather on cage and moaned. He gazed at the inquisitor through pain-filled eyes and gasped, "Stop! Stop it, please, oh, stop it! Stop pulling! Rhyalise!"

The inquisitor smiled hungrily. "Are you ready to recant, Habor?" Fra Pavel soothed his dæmon and glued his eyes to the Scholar.

Everett Habor did not respond. Perhaps he was thinking of how much work, all his life as an experimental theologian, had gone into the great theory, the theory of manifolds and multiple dimensions...he looked at the treatise, his treatise, which was crumpled in the inquisitor's fist.

The inquisitor glared at the thin man slumped against the wall. He went to the locked door of the cell and called to the friars through a window: "All right, three more feet!"

Rhyalise shrieked a fearsome owl cry and fought more fiercely than ever, but her complacent captors obliged and carried her three feet down the hallway: three more feet away from Everett. Their bond stretched taut. Everett screamed, a long wordless utterance of pain and longing and terror. Pavel could not concentrate on the experimental theological question he was supposed to be asking the alethiometer. He held his dæmon so tightly she cried out.

The inquisitor towered over the Scholar. "This is the last time! Do you recant?"

From afar, Rhyalise pleaded with the friars. "Let us go! Please!" For answer, the friars shifted her two more inches farther down the corridor.

That was the catalyst. The feeling was unbearable, and Everett choked on his words: "I recant!"

The inquisitor sighed, an almost innocent sigh of contentment, as though he were warming himself by a hearth. He turned on his heel and spoke directly to Pavel. "Fra Pavel, please send for Father McPhail."

The alethiometrist packed up the tools of his trade with deft, pale fingers and took the key from the inquisitor without meeting his eyes. He unlocked the cell, leaving the bereaving inquisitor and bereft Scholar behind.

He returned a few minutes later in the company of two people.


	2. Chapter Two

One of them was Father Hugh McPhail, the president of the Consistorial Court of Discipline; the other was a woman with lustrous, slightly wavy black hair and an entrancing demeanor. She hung behind the Father, so as to show respect for his superiority, but one could tell that she was very curious and not at all simpleminded, unlike the wordless nuns who acted as secretaries in the Tower Court.

Father McPhail strode briskly towards Everett, the woman following quickly behind, her hands full of notes. She took a fine pen from the breast pocket of her tailored skirt suit and jotted something down.

Father McPhail stood over Everett.

"So you have decided to denounce your heresies and turn to the way of God! We want it on paper. Sign this." He motioned the woman forward and said curtly, "Miss Coulter, the documents, please."

The dark-haired woman, whose name was Marisa, came forward. She cast a calculating glance at the Scholar. She felt no pity for the man with the mild grey eyes who had his head in his hands. A smile flickered over her face as she envisioned the righteous suffering he had endured. His atrocious heresies were almost beyond the Church's power to absolve.

She regarded the waiting President for a moment, his fierce, chiseled face expectant. Chastened, she shuffled through the leaves of paper until she came upon a fine white sheet inscribed with dour words, stamped with the Church's crest. She set it upon a small steel table at one corner of the room and distastefully assisted a nervous Fra Pavel in hoisting Everett Habor under the arms and guiding him over to a chair next to the table. All the energy had been drained out of him, but he tried to support his own weight. He sank limply into the chair. His eyes showed his fear, laced by a weighty feeling of defeat. _You can still turn back,_ a voice inside his head urged. _Don't do this._

_No!_ came another voice. It was Rhyalise. _Everett, please, do whatever they want, my heart is being torn out, Everett, please-_

He sobbed aloud. Trying to ignore the tugging feeling in his heart and the pervasive sense of longing, he composed himself and straightened his wire-rimmed spectacles. He compulsively flicked a lock of hair off his forehead, a nervous gesture, as he peered at the confession form as though it was a paper of experimental theology.

Without taking his eyes from the sheet he wordlessly held out his hand. Miss Coulter jabbed the pen between his fingers and his palm. Eyes closed, he said hoarsely, "What about my dæmon?"

The President said coolly, "After you have signed, of course." The inquisitor nodded and smiled callously.

Everett sighed silently. _You were right, Rhya, _he thought to her. Suddenly he felt as though he could not breathe. His heartstrings were surely snapping, all the air being squeezed out of his lungs...

Alarmed, the President threw open the cell door's window and cried to the friars, "No, no farther! That's enough!" Miss Coulter's dæmon, a golden-haired monkey, looked enthralled. The friars shouted apologies and carried the cage a bit closer.

Father McPhail shut the window heavily and stepped over to Everett. He regarded him with an air of undue patience, saying evenly, "Well, go on, then." The stony lizard dæmon gripped the Father's shoulder tightly with her small claws.

Everett turned his gaze from the President back to the table with the hateful piece of paper. He knew what it said before he even read it.

_All who have erred and been mistaken in the Faith and, by the grace of the Authority, have since returned into the light of truth and the unity of Our Holy Magisterium, should well guard themselves that the Evil One did not drive them back and cause them to relapse into error and damnation._

Everett scanned the page for his name.

_For this cause, I, Everett Habor, more commonly called Scholar Habor of Gabriel College, a miserable sinner, after that I had recognized the snares of error in which I was held, and after that, by the grace of the Authority, I had returned to our Holy Magisterium, in order that it may be seen that, not pretending but with a good heart and good will, I have returned thereto..._

He was not in error, his treatise was as real and true experimental theology as had been seen in a long time, and he knew it...

_I confess that I have most grievously sinned, in committing the most atrocious heresies by making false declarations concerning the nature of Reality, conceived by the Holy Authority; in attempting to seduce others into my ways of sin and corruption; in believing foolishly and lightly; in making superstitious divinations; in blaspheming the Authority and his Kingdom; in authoring a heretical treatise on the nature of Reality and constructing an unholy object based upon heretical theories._

He had not sinned. He had done nothing...

_And upon all these things aforesaid I submit to the correction, disposal, amendment, and entire decision of our Holy Magisterium and of your good justice._

What justice? Was this justice? What would they do to him?

_Also I swear and promise to you..._

There followed a long list of names.

_...to my Lord Saint Peter, Prince of the Apostles, to the memory of the Holy Father Calvin the Pope of Geneva..._

More names...

_...and to you, my Lords, the reverend Father in God my Lord the President of the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the religious person, Father Makepwe, Deputy of my Lord the Inquisitor of the Faith, as my Judges.._

The final promises that the page coldly wrested from him...

_...that never, by any exhortation or other manner, will I return to the aforesaid errors, from which it had pleased Our Lord to deliver and take me; but always I will remain in union with our Holy Magisterium and in the obedience of the Consistorial Court of Discipline. And this I say, affirm, and swear, by God Almighty and by the Holy Gospels._

He was almost finished...

_And in sign of this, I have signed this schedule with my signature._

Everett took the pen and signed his name, Everett Galen Habor. The black ink flowed smoothly from the nib onto the fine-grained surface of the paper. He wrote in uncharacteristic handwriting; instead of the usual plain, dark griffonage he had used ever since he first took notes at a Scholarly lecture, he wrote in a large and looping script with strange serifs over the E and G. Perhaps it was a sort of involuntary defense mechanism, in which the signing was made less painful by being out of character.

At least he wasn't being tried by the full board in the Tower Court...that was the solitary comforting thought that passed through his mind. After the last flourish on the r, he laid down the pen, very gently. The dark-haired lady snatched it up and polished it on a perfumed handkerchief before returning it to her breast pocket. Then Father McPhail came around behind him, reached down, and gingerly picked up the recantation.

He seemed to analyze the signature for a moment; his wiry eyebrows contracted and his eyes waxed intense and vindictive. Then a wave of steely calm passed over his face and he handed the abjuration to Fra Pavel, who had been standing in the doorway glancing nervously from Father McPhail to the cage in the corridor, whose dæmon prisoner had grown quieter. Pavel swallowed as he looked over the sheet, handling it with only the tips of his fingers; after a moment he went to a cabinet near the table and withdrew a folder.

"Thank you, Fra Pavel," Father McPhail said cordially. "Please file that under Gabriel College; you'll find the correct shelf in the Apostasies wing of the Archives, between Corinth and Jordan."

"Yes, Father," said Fra Pavel, and made a quick and deep bow before quitting the cell, his dæmon clasping the folds of his robe at his breast in its small three-toed grip.

"How did we get here?"

A faint voice, sounding exhausted and drained of all vital will, issued from thin, cracked lips in a face latticed by limp fingers. Everett was slumped in his chair, elbows on the table, his face resting in his fingertips. He raised his head and looked at Father McPhail through grey eyes full of tears barely hidden by glasses. The inquisitor's lip curled.

"How did...a coalition of people wishing to, to worship the Authority, become...an institution dedicated to the abolition of enlightenment? How did service to love become service to ignorance? All I proffered was knowledge..." Tears spilled out onto his cheeks.

The inquisitor slapped him and Everett sobbed. From her station in the hallway, Rhyalise let out a screech.

As Everett lowered his head and knit his fingers together over his pendant brow, the inquisitor snarled, "You are a sinner and a fool! You know nothing of the Church! Since the dawn of our ministry we have had to deal with recalcitrant, refractory scum like you. We have power because it has been vested in us by a holy potence that you, as you stand, will never know!" He turned expectantly to Father McPhail, whose eyes were almost sad.

"Take him away," said the president wearily.

At these words, Everett started in fear, then recoiled as the inquisitor seized his shoulder roughly and yanked him to his feet. His knees knocked the underside of the table and he winced, but a smile came to his face as he realized that he would soon be reunited with his soul. Seeing the Scholar's smiling lips, the inquisitor cuffed him on the side of the face. The dark-haired woman watched this brutality with shining eyes, but the president wore a more pensive expression, although any gentleness it might have had was tempered by the placid, iron resolve moulded into his eyebrows and around his eyes.

In a few moments Everett found himself outside in the darkened corridor, flanked by friars and Swiss guards.

"Restore his dæmon," the inquisitor said with a scowl. Everett tried to hurry towards the cage but a file of guards blocked his path. On tenterhooks he waited, gazing eagerly in Rhyalise's direction. Both human and dæmon kept quiet, hardly daring to stir lest their capricious captors fail to unlock the cage and keep separate the two halves of one mind.

He craned his neck to get a glimpse of her as one of the friars unlocked the cage. Rhyalise looked rather worse for the wear as she advanced towards the door, throwing penetrating glances at the monks around her with her keen orange eyes. She stopped at the threshold of the cage and took wing, fixing her eyes on her human. Everett regarded her with rapture as she swooped above her jailers' heads before cutting a celeritous path down to him through the dark air, through the space that separated them, the space through which their invisible golden thread was extended.

She collapsed into his chest and he wrapped his arms around her tightly, tightly, compressing their link into a place of warmth and safety nearly within his body. Unstretched, unpulled, unstrained. Rhyalise was making small noises and Everett suddenly realized that he was making them, too; both too exhausted for words of communion, they wept quietly. She clung to his shirt with sharp talons, and he relished the pain. He smiled tremulously as she lifted from his breast and flew to his left shoulder, nestling the primary remiges of her wing against his ear.

"Restrain the prisoner," ordered the inquisitor. A guard near him seized Everett's arms and pulled them out in front of the Scholar while another of the Church's military lackeys locked heavy iron shackles around his wrists. Everett looked up sharply and opened his mouth, then shut it again.

"What are they––" Rhyalise whispered fearfully in Everett's ear, feeling the handcuffs and shrinking from the sensation. Her stiff outer coat of feathers stood on end and her claws shifted on his shoulder in agitation.

"Rhya––my dear--shh, it's all right," Everett responded quickly, trying to conceal the anxiety in his voice, and knowing it was useless trying to deceive his own soul. Finding his arms released from the guard's pinching grip, with some effort he clankingly lifted a hand and stroked the hornlike ear tufts that were sticking straight up in alarm. Then he leveled his gaze at the inquisitor through a cloud of guards and, pooling his chains in his hands, said, "It was my understanding that I was to be given a greater degree of freedom than this."

The red-robed man sneered. "We offered no such promise." His hyena dæmon's eyes blazed and she circled around his legs, her tail switching.

Everett felt his heart sink. Keeping his hand latched into Rhya's feathers in case they tried to take her away from him again, he said desperately, "What do you want from me? Of what use was my confession to you?"

The inquisitor jabbed his knee towards Everett's solar plexus, but this time Everett saw it coming. Reacting instinctively during the fraction of a second the knee would have taken to strike him, he swung his leg up and his foot connected with the examiner's patella. The latter let out a surprised cry of pain through clenched teeth, and the surrounding guards closed in on Everett. Within seconds found himself held fast by the armpits, elbows, wrists and collar, but not before an overzealous soldier had dealt him a blow from his cudgel. Rhyalise shrieked and wrapped her wings around Everett's neck.

"We want your soul, ingrate! You don't know what to do with it, but we will tender it to God. Your body shall become the property of the Magisterium until your mind is deemed fit to be in the service of the Authority." He cast a fiery glance at the thin, ashen prisoner, who was still staggering from the blow upon his shoulders and upon whose aghast face lines of suffering were already beginning to set. "Get him out of here."

"_My soul...belongs...to me..._" Everett gasped, hanging limply in the guards' clutches and raising his head to stare with fervid eyes at his tormentor.

He addressed his dæmon. 'Rhyalise, you belong to yourself. They cannot...they cannot turn us over to their master. Whatever master it is they––this––this establishment––serves."

"And you are my heart, Everett," the owl cried. She leaned over and straightened his spectacles with her beak, then folded her wings and set her eyes defiantly upon the gathered crowd.

The inquisitor bared his teeth and his dæmon cleaved to the floor, her hips jutting higher than her shoulders and the curling of her lips drawing great grooves in her snout.

"The lower dungeons. Take him downstairs. _Now._"

Then without a second glance he swept the hem of his robes off the stone floor and marched back to the interrogation cell to confer with Father McPhail, evidently choosing to speak immediately about the prisoner rather than waste any more time knocking him about.

Everett was dragged down a long flight of steps that culminated in a low-ceilinged honeycomb of stone halls lit by ancient but still working anbaric lamps. The guards paused upon the stone-flagged floor, then led him down the passage, taking a right, a left, another right, and zagging a few more times before ending up in a cul-de-sac lit by naphtha lamps in sconces. There was a lone door in the bare wall, wooden with a single barred window. Rhyalise shuddered.

Everett's escorts engaged a lock with a large key; the door opened with minimal creaking, its hinges well oiled. His convoy then marched him inside the cell, which was less than cramped if far from spacious. It was absolutely dark, the only light in the room being the large patch that entered from the catacombs outside the door, spilling upon the stone floor in a yellow pool. Everett inhaled and bit his lip at the chill, musty smell. In the gloom he could discern thick deposits of nitre on the walls. He felt like the fool in that American story, _The Cask of Oloroso_. He, too, was being walled in, buried alive in the catacombs.

"Come, move," one of the guards prompted in thinly accented English. Everett took a step and stumbled in the dark; the surface of the floor was uneven, and having his arms pinioned by a multitude of fists impeded his balance. The weight of his fetters was beginning to make his arms ache. The two guards holding his armpits hoisted him up, as did the one clutching his collar, causing Everett to choke and Rhyalise to swoon against his head. His body was frail and not used to such treatment. _Will it never end? _he thought. He was seized by an urgent desire to throw them all off of him, but suppressed it. Once he had been conveyed to the farther wall he was released. His hand brushed something and he perceived that he was near a bale of straw that formed a rudimentary mattress for a blanket and deflated pillow. He felt vaguely that they were attaching him to the wall by his ankles but chose to focus on the light coming from the door instead of the most recent of the string of indignities currently being visited upon his person. His senses were swimming pleasantly; it was almost like escape.

At last he sensed the troupe leaving him. He watched dully as they exited, shutting the wooden door of the cell with a thud and sweeping darkness over the golden block on the floor. A set of narrow rays penetrated the door by way of the barred window in the upper quadrant, but they fell far from the end of the room where he was fastened to the wall. Returning to himself, he sank down upon the straw and leaned against the wall, endeavouring to rearrange his limbs in an attempt to make himself more comfortable. It was futile; every appendage was ensnared by chains that bit into his flesh should he put weight on them. Shifting his feet, still in the boots he'd been wearing back in Oxford, he dragged coils of rusted links across the floor and hugged his knees. He tried to ignore the question that had been pervasively gnawing at him ever since the inquisitor's baleful pronouncement because it was too disturbing to contemplate. Finally, after vying with it valiantly, he let it rise to the top of his consciousness. How long would he be held? Surely Gabriel College would throw its weight behind him...surely it had some influence with the Magisterium? He could not be lost...surely...

Rhya came to life on his shoulder. Her eyes, which for the duration of the past few minutes' travails had been dull, regained a part of their orange flare; a glow that, while not the torchlike blaze that manifested itself on happy days, smouldered like the embers of a dreaming fire.

She nestled to his breast and, as he wordlessly held her, he allowed his mind to open and mused, quietly and with a vengeance. He was not Everett Habor, _formerly_ of Gabriel College; he was _still_ Scholar Habor of Gabriel College, and he would continue to develop his thesis. His cogitation would go underground. No papers, no schematics or prototypes; just reason, with no external sign. They could not put his mind in chains.

He knew that, though they had inflicted every indignity upon his body, he was not yet a broken man.


	3. Chapter Three

He could not be certain of the time when he awoke. He had slipped into a deep sleep punctuated by uneasy dreams, exhausted from the previous day's stresses. As he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was an oblique view of one of the walls of his cell. As he returned his head to the proper upright position he saw that the rays of light on the floor were the same as before. Disoriented, he wondered if it was night or day.

Rhya stirred in the crook of his elbow. "How long has it been, Everett?"

"I don't know," he said uncertainly, his voice taking on the croaking quality of one who has slept for hours without interruption. His mouth felt very dry. He strained his ears and thought he heard more activity outside. "I think the night is over."

He hated admitting it to himself, but he had been seized by a paroxysm of disappointment upon seeing that he was still weighted with iron and shut in between black stone walls. A feeling of torsion and weight upon his scalp incited him to rake his fingers through his thatch of colorless hair; finding the source of the sensation, he picked out a few clumps of straw. The stiffness in his joints pointed to his having been in the same position for many hours. He stretched, hearing his shoulder pop, then drew himself up upon his knees and prostrated himself, protracting his spine. He rose and looked down at Rhya, who was still lying on the floor, her eyes open but listless. On his feet now, he decided to discover the size of the domain granted to him. Taking measured steps like a surveyor, he was able to advance three paces, enough so that if he knelt and stretched out his arm he could touch the barred square of light on the floor with the tips of his fingers. His fingers in the light were the most detailed thing under his gaze. His nails were grooved, his cuticles slightly ravaged. His digits looked so impotent. He looked at his dæmon. "Help me, Rhya, go take a look, won't you?"

With a few beats of her wings she propelled herself to his shoulder. "Go to the door, you mean?" she intuited.

"Yes. Is there anyone...tell me if you see..."

Rhyalise went to the window and hovered before the bars. "There's guards in the hallway. The transverse hallway. They're pacing. They duck into our cul-de-sac from time to time. I hear...they...they're talking, but I can't make anything out."

"Swiss guards? They're Swiss guards, you mean? What do they look like?"

"Yeah, Swiss guards. There's four...no, three, one just up and left. They don't look like anything. One is young and blond, and one is fat and old, and one is skinny."

"What about the other prisoners in the corridor? Do I have neighbors in the cells closest me, in the main hall?" Everett asked hopefully, straining to see.

"I haven't a clue. I can't tell. I don't hear anything. It's bloody quiet here. Oh, hell..."

Everett felt a dry sob rise in his throat but clenched the lapels of his coat until he felt the urge to cry receding. Releasing himself, he raised his head and looked back at his dæmon silhouetted at the window. Suddenly she jerked back. "Another one is coming––he's coming––he's coming––"

Everett quickly flattened himself against the wall and Rhya hid inside his coat. With an immense clacking and clattering––had it been that noisy when they shut him in?––the door was unlocked and a guard with a lamp came in, almost tripping on that same buckle in the floor that Everett had caught his foot on.

"Watch yourself," Everett said automatically.

"Are you making fun of me?" the guard asked sharply, his glaring face garishly lit by the lamp.

"No," Everett said, flinching. _You dumb sod. Why would you even care, you fool? Let the blighter trip._ Rhya emerged from his coat and perched on his shoulder.

"Good," said the guard, looking at him distrustfully. He unslung a sack from his shoulder and set a trencher of bread, a lump of cheese, a jug of water and a pot of porridge in the straw next to Everett. "Breakfast. You're new, I expect. Have the bowl ready for us to collect in five hours." Then he went out, taking that marvelous warm light with him.

Everett hadn't realized how hungry he was. The food wasn't even half bad. True, the porridge was unseasoned––and there was no spoon–– but the bread and cheese were not unlike the coarse fare he had been accustomed to eating in Oxford anyway. Despite his initial hunger pangs, his appetite rapidly waned after he'd finished the mush and he squirrelled a portion of the bread and cheese in the pockets of his frock coat, a parachronistic garment he'd gotten from his grandfather. Bottle-green, with brown trim and cuffs, it was heavily patched. It had been humiliating to be arrested dressed in motley, as it were, but he was now slightly glad he had been wearing it the day was seized. It was ample, and comfortable, and would make a fine pillow or blanket or, worst come to worst, bandages. He liked having the food stashed on his person. It made him feel less powerless. _You are going mad_, he said to himself.

"No, we're not," said Rhyalise.

Five days passed.

For the first two Everett asked the guards bringing him his meals about any news concerning his case, the hope burning in his breast driving him to brazenness; but after the second day he gave up once he realized that it was true, the men indeed knew nothing. They had not the power to give him books, pens, light, nor to free him from his fetters; they had not minds at all, as far as matters concerned him, but rather were automatons charged day by day by higher-ups with the most basic treatment of the wretches locked in the dungeons.

On the sixth day he was brought back up into the cellars. He was bound and blindfolded on the way up, but the guards were gentler with him. He preferred the new arrangement, being willing to trade sight for better treatment, but he could tell that it disturbed Rhya greatly. He knew when they had reached their destination by the way the quality of the sound was shaped by the enclosed spaces unique to the Consistory cellars. He was pushed into a hard-edged chair, his pinioned wrists lashed to the back of it, and the blindfold removed.

The light was dim, but it still hurt his eyes. He blinked and hid his eyes in his right shoulder. The ropes he had exchanged his handcuffs for were rubbing where he was already raw, and he gritted his teeth, resolving to stay as still as possible. Rhyalise climbed down from his other shoulder and slid inside his coat, next to his heart. He felt her feathers against his shirt. His heart and Rhya together under the protective blanket of his particolored frock coat.

His ability to see regained, he looked anxiously at the assemblage. The cloud of guards had left. Father McPhail, Father Makepwe and four judges sat at a table, facing him, with papers stacked neatly in front of them. His inquisitor from before was not there, and he breathed a small sigh of relief. He forced himself to stop contemplating the floor and looked at his accusers, hoping he looked innocent. Consumptive-pale, with dark eye sockets, his thin angular face framed by slight sideburns mingling with the unshaven growth of six days, he planted his boots on the floor and did his best to sit up straight.

"Everett Galen Habor," Father Makepwe began.

"Yes, Father," the slight man tied to the chair said deferentially.

Father McPhail's brow darkened. "Do not speak. You are a heretic and have lost that privilege."

The scholar felt his eyes begin to prickle. What was this? "Everett Habor," Makepwe repeated, "We have reviewed your case. Your crimes were grave enough to be considered capital offenses, but after careful deliberation we have decided to suspend that sentence. Your case, as it stands, is still pending. Your current sentence is life imprisonment."

This had to be the inquisitor's doing. _Don't kill him,_ he would have said, **_Reform_** _him._ How stinging cruel the impulse of mercy. He would rot away his life in their damp nitre-crusted boxes. His worst fears were confirmed––he was in limbo.

With horror he realized that that was all. His condemners were packing up the papers of his case. He would be bold.

"Can I write a letter?"

One of the judges looked at him askance. "What for?"

"To my colleagues. To my friends. To tell them where I am."

"Gabriel College has been notified."

"And my laboratory? Is it still––"

"Your chapel is currently in sequestration, and arrangements are being made for its relegation to another theologian. You have lost your post."

"When shall I be extradited to Anglia?" Everett asked bravely, feeling that at this point he had nothing to lose, if he was no longer an underchaplain. He felt ill. His question did not even make any sense. If they executed him, he would probably never see Brytain again.

"What insolent nonsense is this, you heretic? When we so decide, and that's enough out of you!"

But Everett was unfazed. What on earth could this man do to him that would worsen his situation? His life was already over. He knew that as it stood the soldier lackeys would trammel him again, so he asked, "Do I have to remain in chains? Please––"

"Yes," the judge snapped.

"Then––may I...have a light? It's...so dark in there..."

"No," the judge said brusquely, putting his things in order and ignoring Everett for the remarks of his colleagues. Another of the judges opened the door, and Father McPhail ordered the guards inside.

"Back to his cell," he said coldly, and the bandage came back down over Everett's eyes.

Back in the dark. Limbs loaded. Chill and damp. The dull wooden door thudded shut.

Everett felt a sudden cold effluvium fill his chest, creeping across his skin, spreading through his limbs, and, letting himself go, he wept. With the tap of a chisel, he crumbled. Jerkily, drily, in starts and fits at first, then gaining momentum until his sorrow, at the privation of his freedom and the death of Scholar Habor, burst out of him in a barely controlled flood of tears and shaking shoulders.

"No...this can't be _happening_..."

He ripped at his hair, his shirt, clawed at the floor, took up fistfuls of his straw and flung them as far as he could. Rhyalise keened and threw her wings open, every feather splayed out as wide as it would go--every point thrust into the air like a dagger--and threw herself with anguished speed around the upper heights of the area of the cell she could stay in without tugging on their bond. They would never, ever test it again, not even in disagreement, not even as an act of bravado. They would have to be subdued, kicking and screaming with every ounce of resistance contained in their mortal bodies, before they would allow themselves to be separated again.

He punched the wall in a fit of enraged grief, then cried out as his knuckles connected with the stone. Sucking them, his eyes blazing invisibly in the dark, he brooded over what battered remnants of his life still remained.

Rhya swept to his side, her feathers grotesquely ruffled. "We are nothing now, Everett!" She flung herself to the floor and hid her head in her wing. Everett buried his face in his arms, gritted his teeth, and bellowed. "You can't do this! You fucking sods! Ignorant, intolerant, closed-minded fools! You dirty tyrants...you are all blind...all!"

A shadow was cast upon the floor, mostly blotting out the barred square of light thereon; its author was a guard at the door. There came a pounding on the decimeter-thick portal, followed by a yelled command.

"Quiet yourself!"

"Sod off, you bloody tossers!" Everett returned, shouting in the Bow Bells vernacular he thought he'd permanently suppressed. "You can't––you can't do this to me! You drones of dullness! You gormless lackeys! You––"

There came the clattering of a key in a lock and a troika of guards invaded the room. Everett's anger turned to fear in an instant, like a flash-frozen flame, as they advanced on him with cudgels clasped threateningly in their fists.

"No––don't hit me––"

He received a series of unceremonious wallops from the business end of the three sentries' sticks, delivered in between his and Rhya's cries of protest.

"_Ferme ta gueule, toi!_"

"All right––all right––all right!" he yelled, cringing, shielding his head with his arms, shrinking from them.

They paused, panting.

"I'll stop, I'll curb my noise, I'll be quiet! _Je me tairai!"_ he choked finally in broken French.

They looked at each other and shrugged, then took their leave, but not before one of them delivered a half-hearted kick to the miscreant.

He still had some lachrymal energy left in him, but his fight was all gone. He continued to cry until he was dry. He couldn't say he felt better, but he felt exhausted, and that was an easier feeling to handle. It was physical. His mind began to slip into quietus. Aching inside and out, he drew himself up upon his elbows and forced himself to face his predicament again. His hands sought his boots and he inspected them with his fingers. Resignedly, he unlaced them and rubbed his feet, clothed in old riddled socks. He might as well make himself comfortable; this vault was his home now. No doubt all his possessions were now the property of his quarters' new tenant. In an attitude of evenness, he laid his shoes neatly side by side against the wall. Ridiculously, he could not remove his coat because of his restraints; he had not noticed at first, on account of the dungeon's chill. This had been a problem for the past several days. Now, again, he was growing warmer and wished to be in shirtsleeves. The absurdity of this situation caused him momentarily to laugh bitterly. His redingote was unbuttoned and halfway off; feeling beaten, he pulled it back on and tried to roll up the sleeves before opening the collar of his shirt. Rhyalise perched on his chest and fanned him with her wings, and he gratefully allowed the darkness to overtake him, feeling as he did so Rhya's wingbeats growing slower and less powerful as he drifted closer to stupor.

The days blurred together after that. As they passed Everett found himself growing numb, although Rhyalise was still given to weeping occasionally. There was one ritual they developed, to keep distinct the days that would otherwise be glossed over and polished into one unbroken stream by the flow of time. After the morning meal that signified the lightless start of each new day in a world that otherwise remained unchanged by the passing of the hours, Rhya would etch a tally into the wall with her talons, the bundles of which Everett could count if he rubbed the wall with his fingers like a sightless man reading Braille. He was at first in the habit of counting up the days irregularly, only after several markings had been consecutively traced upon the stone without his hands then subsequently finding them in the dark and summing the bundles of four sticks crossed with a fifth; at length, however, the process took on a ritualized aspect, wherein he would count his days in prison prior to retiring for the night, sometimes falling asleep while obsessively totaling and re-totaling the grooves, the tip of his index finger searching for the diagonal line slashed through at an angle that denoted a unit of five, stuck in the loop of the only routine over which he had complete autonomy.

Everything else was externally ordained: his meal in the morning, his meal in the evening, the occasional suicide watch, the weekly emptying of his chamber pot. The latter he somewhat enjoyed, as he was allowed to walk freely, and see, at least, multiple human faces in the light that hurt his eyes wonderfully during his sojourn through the corridor. He never encountered any other prisoners, a fact he resented bitterly, but it was enough on some days merely to see other people and be reminded of the fact that a world still operated outside of his cell, one that was spacious, well-lit and greatly populated. It took away from the creeping feeling that he inhabited a dark, one-man universe, a plane of four walls, stone floor and ceiling, barred square of light, and banished his dreams of being trapped in one of his own compactified dimensions.

Everett lay upon his straw and stewed.

He had gone the way of Galileo. Back when the Church was located in Rome, Copernicus' heir had come into conflict with the Magisterium, as a man of mathematics, astronomy, telescopy, wisdom...for daring to articulate the orbits of the Earth and Sun.

Everett's thoughts then turned to Giordano Bruno, the first freethinker, who was held in Geneva for eight years before being burned alive in the year one thousand six hundred. Everett had seen the etching.

Was he, Everett Galen Habor, to be added to this pantheon of ruined thinkers? His path, previously so agreeable and stuffed with lectures, dreaming spires and pots of tea, had suddenly forked into two nearly equally horrible prospects upon his capture by the Church, and the way back down the road from whence he came was barred shut. He had been forced to choose back in that interrogation chamber in the cellars, and had been unable to tread the path of Giordano Bruno.

"I am weak, Rhya..." he said.

"No!" she hissed. "Would you have had them tear us apart?" She then spat, wild with consternation, "You are not he, and I do not have the form of a tiger!"

"They say that fire cannot destroy fire," he said, his teeth gritted, "But he burned."

How ironic it all is, he thought. The Church never learns from their mistakes. Heliocentrism had been adopted centuries ago––nay, co-opted as Church doctrine. How had such a paradigm shift occurred without shaking the foundations of the Church?

If only he could speak to his friend the Cassington Scholar...he wondered helplessly if Jordan College's resident skeptic would have been able to avoid this mess simply by dint of his professional role. The Scholarship was given to freethinkers, some of whom even denied the Authority––what was so special about them? What gave them and only them license to practice free thought?

Was he, like Galileo, to be forbidden to publish his works?

If he ever got out of here.

* * *

Five hundred miles away, the Cassington Scholar stood outside the Master of Gabriel College's door and rapped.

"Come in," said a voice within. The Scholar turned the knob and swung the door open with an air of caution. Incongruously with his diffident demeanor, however, his russet-orange salamander dæmon was alert and perspicacious on his shoulder.

"Oh, Thalius Martin," the Master said ambivalently, looking up and spotting Jordan College's resident freethinker approaching the foot of his chair. He set the tome he had been leafing through on his desk and looked his visitor in the face. "What's on your mind? How are things at Jordan?"

"Jordan functions," the Scholar responded equivocally. "You and the body of Gabriel College are well, I trust?"

"Yes," the Master replied, sanguinely but with just a trace of guardedness in his voice.

"And Scholar Everett Habor?"

The Master froze.

"Habor's quarters," Thalius said with edgy serenity, "are empty, dark and locked from without. He has not responded to any of my letters for weeks. I inquired at his chapel and found his post filled by someone with a name not his. When I checked the roster I found his name blanked out. Where is he?"

"Scholar Habor is no longer in our employ," the Master said pinchedly, his eyes flickering up once to meet Thalius' and then returning to his book. There was silence for a moment and then, realizing that the Cassington Scholar was still standing before him, he elevated his gaze once more.

"He is no longer with us," the Master said again.

"Where is he?" Thalius persisted.

"He has left," the Master replied ambiguously.

"Where is he?" Thalius repeated. The salamander on his shoulder stretched her flexuous serpentine body and, arching her back, whipped around to Thalius' other shoulder.

"I don't know," the Master said without meeting Thalius' eyes. His dæmon rustled on his lap apprehensively.

"I..." Thalius looked at his dæmon. "Jylaxia, what do you...?"

She perked her head, tipped with small slug-like horns. "I think, Thalius, that perhaps the Master is not speaking the whole truth." She set her eyes on the latter's dæmon and burned a hot gaze into her guilty face.

The Master of Gabriel College slammed his wizened palms upon the suface of the desk. "What do you want from me?"

Thalius lowered his luminescent light brown eyes and relaxed his brow. "I want," he said calmly, "to know where my friend is."

Without a word the Master scooped up his dæmon, stood up and opened a drawer. "Here!" He removed a small stack of papers and tossed them at the Scholar, who within the storm of white flutter briefly perceived the crest of the Church. Auburn-brown eyebrows re-knit in heated choler, the Cassington Scholar stooped to pick up the sheets he had failed to snatch out of the air. One caught his eye and he brought it up close to his face. "But this is––" he silenced himself midsentence and looked briefly at the Master before returning his attention to the sheet in his hand, which was a warrant for the arrest of his friend Everett Habor.

"_'Delictum: Seditious, high heretical and heterodox activities..._'!" said Thalius. "They can't be serious!"

The Master's expression was stern and a little supercilious. "Yes, they are very much so. It is..."

But the Cassington Scholar was not listening; he was busy reading the rest of the dispatches. This next one was a long memorandum emblazoned with the Consistorial Court's letterhead and stamped with an enormous ecclesiastical watermark. Thalius read and read, flipping the pages expeditiously without reading every word because each phrase intensified his horror; the last page bore the signatures of the twelve members of the Consistorial Court. _Should the Magisterium contact you at a later date concerning the matter of the release of Everett G. Habor, it shall do so at its leisure and under its own volition. The Court reserves its right to hold said party, as a confessed heretic and transgressive malefactor, indefinitely._

"Yes, I see now," said Thalius, his gaze dark and jaw set, as he put on his scarf and tugged his trilby down on his forehead. "_Left,_ has he?"

"Don't go after him!" enjoined the Master. "I'm warning you, I know that those who garner the Cassington Scholarship are always fools, but you especially––wretched Hibernian––you'd do well to heed the Palmerian Professor."

Thalius Martin looked up sharply, his face bearing a wry expression. Giving the Master a bitter smile that was half a sneer of grim determination, he said, "In a world such as yours, Professor, I could do no better than to be marked a fool by one of its obeisants."

"I will need those papers back, if you please," the Master said with a tight-lipped, similarly disdainful smile.

The Cassington Scholar pushed down upon the crown of his gray felt hat and held the papers out to the Master. "Thank you for your time."

He turned upon his heel and with a swish of scarf was gone.


	4. Chapter Four

A boyish blond Swiss guard and a burly senior warden were on watch at the end of Everett's passage.

"What'd he do, sir?" the young guard asked the other outright as he paced, with a glance and a toss of the head in Everett's direction.

"He is a heretic," the older guard replied. "From Gabriel College...an experimental theologian, I've heard."

"Oh," the younger one said apprehensively, fiddling with his gun. "I wonder what he said...to be put in the lower dungeons, that's..."

"What does it matter?" his leaden-faced senior said, looking at him sharply. "It's heresy. He's been locked up so he doesn't spread any more of his seditious poison, and you're undermining the Church's will with your questions!" His mastiff dæmon emitted a rasping, nearly inaudible growl, and his hand tensed involuntarily for a moment on the handle of his club.

The blond guard's eyes, for a moment dreamy and filled with possibilities, snapped over to meet with the elder's. His eyebrows drew together and he glowered, his silver fox dæmon's countenance dark and stormy. "Yes, of course. He's dangerous...worse than a lunatic. Why do men like him exist, sir?"

"Because of the fallen of God's army of angels...and..." the older guard leaned in close, "Rusakov particles."

"Rusa what particles?"

"You can't see them. They're not even sure that they're there. But I've heard them talking about them...up there in the courts...they say it's original sin. Falling from the _sky_."

The young man's eyes widened. "You mean...original sin is real? I mean––" he clapped a hand to his mouth and looked about–– "I mean, of course it's real, what I mean to say is, it can be seen and felt? It has substance? It's measurable? Quantifiable?" He cast his eyes around him once more and tugged on his beret.

"I don't know anything about it but what I've heard. And seen––a couple of photograms."

"What were they like?"

"Well," said the elder guard, now losing himself in the story and forgetting to lower his voice, "I didn't get too good a look at them because I was supposed to be, you know, on watch. I had duty outside the consistory and the door was open. Lately they've taken to having those meetings with the door shut, though. But they were looking at...it was so strange...it was near Svalbard, and the snow and ice were everywhere and everything, all there was, I've heard about that. And there were lights in the sky, I've heard of those too. But this––this is what was strange. There were people there, and there was this––it was like a swarm of firebugs, but...so numerous. Like sparks, but they were none of them dying. And even at the bonfires you've never seen sparks like this, they weren't just in a cloud, they were clustered so thickly together that in some parts you couldn't see the space between them for the light. The sparks were all around the people...and they got thinner and thinner as you got farther away from the figures in the picture. It was swarming _around_ them, Jeanneret. Sticking to them. Drawn to them."

"It sounds beautiful," said the epicene blond, spreading his fingers upon his cheekbones and snowy Roman nose in transport.

At these words the tall, massive-boned guard stiffened and seemed to remember himself. "No. No, it can't be––it's original sin. The curse of Eve. It must be destroyed."

"Destroyed––how? Is that what they're saying?"

"Well, there's talk. They're not completely sure of what it is. But there's a lot of talk of destroying it––or whatever it comes from." Then he paused and grew fierce once more. "Do not mention it, Jeanneret. It is not of God. They know how to handle it, but it is not for us to discuss."

"Yes, sir."

But all the same, he peered down the corridor and his eyes lit once more on that small barred window in the solitary door.

* * *

Inside, Everett the heretic was stretched out on the floor as far as he could go, his head a few inches from the illuminated square. Lying on his back, with his arms crossed under his head and resting on the pillow he'd brought over from his straw bed, he contemplated the dark wall to which he was moored. The surface swam tenebrously in the light that basked his eyes, like the house as seen by an actor from the stage when the lights are up, but Everett could still make out a few details. The wall was of hewn stone, lunarly pitted and grooved in parts; here and there a large fissure ran along lines of stress; and an abundance of man-made markings pocked the lower half of the wall.

He raised himself onto one arm and fished the largest of several crusts of bread out of his pocket. Lying supine in the lambent reverse-shadow cast by the chink in his stone keep, he gnawed on the crust as Rhya cleaned her feathers with her beak, then sat up and took a swig of water from the pitcher that lay within arm's reach. It was usually cold when they first filled his jug, a luxury he liked. So long as they kept his water cold he could handle this. He could take this. His straw was fresh, and he had a glowing square on the floor to look at, and the heat of his coat no longer oppressed him, as he had managed to rip it apart along the seams. When he got too cold he would wrap it around him like a cloak; he amused himself by studying the various patches stitched onto the pea-green fabric in the light. There was some silky black material on the breast, close to one of the buttonholes; and, on the elbow, a large square of sailcloth-like stuff printed with an outrageous yellow and red pattern gaped at him like an obscene smile.

Yes, contemplating colorful scraps of cloth and sipping cool water were more than enough to sustain him while he waited for someone to come save him. Gabriel College had been notified, yes, yes, but they had yet to make their _response!_ He was well-enough liked, all right, and he had acolytes in his laboratory to look after, and dozens of people came to him for help with their work––_someone_ would come for him. Retrieve him...deliver him...reclaim him from this place. Claim him! They wanted him! He was _their _property!

The Master! He was a respected figure, perhaps not the most powerful, but grand enough––and the Council of Physical Theology, he'd submitted his disquisition to them, too, they'd do someth––yes––they'd all––help him! Get him out of here! They wouldn't let him die in some some dark hole somewhere. He tittered at the thought. Ha-ha! Funny, that! It had been some time yet, but no doubt they were still debating their course of action. The Church was a force to be reckoned with, after all. They couldn't very well just come charging in and demand he bet set at liberty, could they? No, that was right out.

It also explained why he'd heard nothing in the way of aid even though they––the Master, the Professors, his saviors––must have known of his arrest even as it happened. The arresting officers had come to him in his study chamber, after all. It was evening, and when he heard the entitled-sounding knock on the door, he assumed it was business regarding his request for a grant, or perhaps he'd been asked to join an experimental team––that was his own scholastic ambition talking, of course. He pinched his spectacles between thumb and forefinger in annoyance at being disturbed, but his eyebrows remained good-naturedly relaxed as he rose to greet his visitors politely. Opening the door, he found a party of hard and impassable looking men. Their looks made his heart jump into his throat. The foremost man cleared his throat and read from a scroll of paper. "Everett Habor, you are hereby bound to obey a summons to Geneva."

Everett's eyebrows did then assume a rather severe shape, but rather more from shock than irritation. "To _Geneva?_ A summons?" His voice trembled. "What for?"

Without asking for entry, the man pushed the door open and the four others forced their way in.

"You are under arrest for violation of Section 5 of the Canon Conventions heretical code. Your body and your dæmon are hereby declared Church property."

Two of the officiers grasped him by the upper arms, and Everett abruptly dropped his book and cast a last look at his desk. It looked so alone; he wished he could find a surrogate to fill that chair before he left.

"May I ask what I did?"

The arresting officer consulted his parchment. "The names of the heretical texts in question are classified information. This dialogue can go no further. You must come with us."

The airship ride was comfortable. As he was closely guarded, in the company of high-ranking persons, he found himself in passenger conditions approaching first class. He'd only ever ridden steerage before.

The cellars had been rather less amenable.

He was still pondering the aggregate of scorings on the wall. Getting up and drawing nearer to examine the stone more closely, he saw that most of the marks formed words or crude pictograms. Some looked like they were made by bird claws, like his now-abandoned cluster of tallies; others by the blunt pewter edges of the prison utensils; some of the grooves seemed to have been made with objects more mysterious still, like an oversized canine tooth. He explored the walls further with his palms and was startled when his digits encountered a set of deep, erratic gouges that were much deeper than they had appeared. They were of a quality that pointed to their maker being an agent possessing a fearsome set of claws. Who had had such a dæmon? Who had occupied the cell before him? What sort of person––and had he or she ever been freed?

At the look of those harrowing gashes, a dark blob of despair swam in his chest, and a scummy spume made of all the worst of his boredom and neglect and dejection floated to the top and made him sit and curl in upon himself atop his straw for the next three hours.

* * *

Tonight he had victualing duty.

Michel Jeanneret adjusted his baldric, stuffed his buttery hair under his cap and shifted the weight of his lamp and the sack hanging from the strap on his shoulder. He'd volunteered to feed Row Eight, and he didn't know if he'd made a mistake. _Stupid, callow boy--corruptible, evil boy!_ Well, if something went wrong, he would tell it all at confession. It was too late to get out of feeding duty now, and even if he could it would arouse suspicion and Rousseau and Stahl would know _why_ he had taken on Row Eight tonight and..he steadied the bundle of food with one hand and, his heart thumping, unlocked the door, his lamp a bubble of thin orangish light.

The prisoner had his head between his knees. With a jolt of fascination Jeanneret noticed that the man's dæmon was a horned owl. His own dæmon, Serilda, perked her ears agreeably, her frosted black coat rippling over the workings of pleased, cautiously curious muscles. The man didn't even raise his head at the sound of the door opening; he did not look up until Jeanneret had crossed over the door-shaped beam of naphtha light and approached his straw perch.

"Here's your dinner," Jeanneret said, and the sound of his own voice startled him. With shaking hands he set down his lamp in its compass of ochre light and opened up the food sack.

Everett regarded him subtly, his dull melancholy embroidered slightly with interest. The boy couldn't have been much older than nineteen.

The guard looked up and took a sealed serving of fish stew out of the bag. His lips twitched but he said nothing. Everett looked at his eyes and saw that they were not brick walls.

"What's your name?"

"Michel," the young guard said shyly.

"Well, Michel," Everett said, holding out one manacled hand, "it's nice to meet you."

Michel Jeanneret shied away for a moment, balking at the scabs on the wrist and the grime on the hand that looked charcoaled on but most of all at the touch of a heretic––but at length he took it and shook. The theologian seemed friendly. He didn't have scales or scrofula and most of all he seemed decent. Serilda was circling cautiously around the owl.

"I'm Everett," the man said, trying to muster a smile.

"What are you here for?" Jeanneret whispered.

Rhyalise rustled on Everett's shoulder, and he looked wistfully at the circle of light under the guard's lamp. Straightening his shoulders firmly, he looked into those eyes of the guard's that were like fountains waiting to be watered. Dry but so deep. The fox padded behind her human and peeked out from around his knees.

"I am here," said Everett, studying the contents of his soup bowl and looking back up at his young jailer, "for saying that there is more than what we see."

Jeanneret shook the bread and boiled potato out of the sack and rolled it up into an agonizing knot. "...more? What...what do you mean? More what?"

Everett's eyes reflected the lamplight and his fingers played the air. "Bring me paper, and something to write with," he said conspiratorially, "and I will show you."

_Maybe he's a spy. But what––why––there is nothing on earth they could do to punish me. Maybe they want to see if I'm recalcitrant. To know whether to kill me. Well, let them. I won't sit here any longer without even asking, without even trying, to study._

Jeanneret crouched. Serilda was quavering with curiosity. They wanted to know.

"I'll bring you paper. And you'll explain?"

"I will." An apostate's promise was as good as any's.


	5. Chapter Five

The train rattled through the Cthonic Railway tunnel. The Cassington Scholar, his expression blank save the small but heavy knit at the apex of his eyebrows, was leaving for the Continent.

The naphtha lamps glowed at intervals inside the dark intestines of the Underground, and Thalius Martin stared them all down. _How dare they?_ No right at all did they have to snatch Everett from his bed, his nest, his home––his refuge––his sanctuary––

Thalius clenched his fists, teeth bared, and the mousy housewife seated next to him shied away and hugged her bag of groceries like a shield. He smiled apologetically at her and touched Jylaxia lightly in the palm of his hand. In a matter of hours he would be in Dover, and thence to Gallia across the Channel drink...

There was one man he wanted to see before he went to Switzerland, a Professor: Hilaire-Philippe Damien Louis Thibault Gariépy, known to his contacts as Damien, at the Sorbonne in the Gallian capital of Lutèce. If he were to leap into the viper's nest at Geneva, he must try and get a handle on this whole mess first, and no one could better point out the warps and wefts of Everett's scholarly tapestry than M. Gariépy. Thalius knew that the Professor must speak English, as Everett's French was even worse than his own, and they had had a lively correspondence.

Thalius' worry was ever-present and set his teeth on edge. What had they done to his friend? Had they tortured him? Had they kil––no no no no no no no no no. They wouldn't. They couldn't. And neither could they have released him, a possibility Thalius had considered before departing for London; he would have sent word immediately after being freed. Either way, the lack of communication surely meant that something was wrong, gravely wrong.

Visions of men in robes danced through his head and he mentally strangled them.

"They've gone too far this time," he said to his dæmon, staring through the subway window.

"Too far?" she said caustically. "It didn't matter when it was _other_––nameless, faceless––Scholars they were kidnapping, but now that it's personal it's '_too far'?_"

The Cassington Scholar bowed his fedora-hatted head and cupped Jylaxia in his hands. "You're right, love. That didn't come out right." Quirking an eyebrow, he added, "But you're not being fair, darling. I _did_ care. I'm the Cassington bloody Scholar, it's my _job _to struggle against this muck. I get battle fatigue, I suppose, that's all." Then, grandiloquently: "I send in my petitions to Manumission International along with everybody else! That's the largest dissident advocacy organization there is!"

She flicked her tail. "Aye, aye, aye," she said with mock-cynicism, and curled up over his wrist. Thalius realized he was growing sleepy, as well; it was the vibration of the train, the humming thrill it made as it shuttled in its burrow.

He had applied for a sabbatical. The Master had given him three months' leave––but not, of course, with the knowledge that the Cassington Scholar was headed for the College of St. Jerome. Most other people would have at least voiced their concerns to the Master, but Thalius' reckless streak, the one that stained Jylaxia such an incandescent red, spurred him on alone, and accordingly, he kept his corrosive worry locked behind his lips. He saw only one destination, had only one mission––go head to head with the most powerful arm of the Magisterium. Oh, how he wanted to storm in like a squall, sending their papers racing in funnels of red wind––but he was more independent than rash, and his rage was tempered with caution. He mustn't let them win, and sticking his neck out for them to hack off was certainly a good way for him to lose. He must play his cards well. He would amass a hand such as they had never seen. But first, before he went there, Thalius was going to Gallia to prepare his deception.

Gallian food was bloody wonderful like, too.

Snoozing against the window frame, he dreamed of more churchmen, saw first one Master's face, then the other's; imagined Everett in the Botanic Garden where he liked to wander and cogitate––and then watched as Everett was seized by the shadowy churchmen, and manhandled, and pulled every which way––

Thalius woke up, shuddering from the nightghast. But before he could reassure himself that it was only a dream, the purpose of his journey leapt upon him. What might they be doing to his poor friend, even at this very moment? He imagined Everett's features marred by pain and felt a pang of angry nausea rise into his throat. _I'm coming_, he broadcast._ I'm coming, hold on_.

The white cliffs of Dover greeted him like a mirage, like the glaciers off Svalbard hanging into cold azure water that gleamed with the watery golden glare of the encroaching sunset. Pushing off into the waves, his heart rose in sympathy with the buoyancy of the ferry...and he was floating, he was off.

The journey from Calais was deliciously quick, and soon he was in Gallia's capital city. The Sorbonne was a majestic edifice, part cloister, part cupola, part soaring Classical architecture with the straight parallel linear glory of columns. In the heart of Lutèce it stood, exchanging cool breaths with the narrow river Seine. The quay echoed with the hollow pock of waves, cheek to cheek with the lamp posts that glowed in the mist, as Thalius hurried through the darkness.

Thalius had never met the ostensibly sage Damien before, in person or otherwise, but he carried himself with the bearing of a Scholar, always at home in a hall of learning. He had learned confidence long ago, learned how to show it even when he had long stopped feeling it. He stopped a passing Scholar with a mourning dove dæmon. "_Je cherche Monsieur Gariépy, le professeur de...de..._" he said in atrociously accented French. He struggled for the word. "_Le professeur de...comment dit-on..._atomcraft?" He then calqued hesitantly, "_L'art des atomes?_" His confidence abandoned him and he smiled diffidently.

The student did not, in fact know the English word "atomcraft," but he did know Monsieur Gariépy, and through their shared knowledge of Arabic numerals and the use of sign language they were able to establish where the office of Hilaire-Philippe Damien was.

The Sorbonne Scholar nodded perfunctorily and walked off. _Anglians,_ he thought disdainfully. "I've never met a Bryton who wasn't completely daft," said his mourning dove, and the Scholar gave a peculiarly Gallic smirk.

After having ascended several sets of stairs and wound through a maze of corridors like the inside of a nautilus shell, Thalius found and knocked on the door of Damien's office, praying fervently that the man spoke English. _Please, please let him be more learned than I..._

"_Entrez!_" came a voice that was strained and thick, dust-covered and rich.

Thalius did so, doffing his hat and holding it graciously upon his breast.

"Excuse me, sir. Please pardon the cold visit, but there was no time to send a letter. I beg your help in a matter of urgency," he said, speaking as quickly as he could while trying to remain constrained by the conventions of gentlemanliness and clarity. Peering about, he saw a desk with a warm lamp, walls lined with books in every cranny, and a man with dark hair and gray features sharply cut like lathed facets of granite whose his porcupine dæmon was lying on the desk in the pool of light from the golden anbaric lamp. The office was small; the room was stuffed with photograms, charts, and folios, and the desk was cluttered with papers, writing materials and objects in various states of use––a pocket adding machine, a micrometer, a Geiger counter, a projecting lantern.

Damien's pen was halfway dipped in his inkwell, and he set it to rest. Training a pair of curious black eyes on his guest, he said cordially, "You are welcome, sir. Please, sit down. I am afraid, however, that I cannot promise you any help until I know what the situation is." His voice bore only a trace of an accent, a quirked lilt that sounded more like the way a New Dane spoke than a typical Gallian. His open manner and generous words put Thalius at ease at once.

Thalius pulled up a light balsa folding chair that was propped near the doorframe and seated himself. "My name is Thalius Martin. I've come just this day from Jordan College in Oxford, where I hold the position of Cassington Scholar."

"_L'Érudit Cassington!_" Damien said warmly. "Pleased to make your acquaintance." They grasped hands across the desk.

"I've come to seek your guidance as regards a mutual colleague of ours," said Thalius. He took a breath. "My friend and your contact, Gabriel Scholar and underchaplain Everett Habor, is currently––" he could hardly bear to say it. He struggled for the words. "Currently––under the...the _charge _of the Consistorial Court in Geneva."

Damien turned away and swore into a crumpled hand. "_Oh, les fils de pute! Les scélérats!_" He reached another coarse, knotty hand into a desk drawer to pull out a pack of dirty yellow Gitanes and began to smoke angrily, quickly placing an almost unbearably acrid pall of smoke between himself and his guest. Thalius tried not to cough and only half-succeeded, ending up emitting a strangled chirp instead. These Gallians, and their perennial obsession with various foul brands of smokeleaf! His eyes watered.

Damien sighed. "I was worried about him. Fine young man. I'm ashamed that so many of my countrymen are goons in the employ of that fine establishment. The revolutionaries had the right idea when they massacred all those Swiss guards at the Tuileries..." He caressed his brow and looked at Thalius. "I joke, of course. I've never been political. I just care about particles—that's all! Unfortunately, in the world that we live in, the Church casts its smokescreen of myth and politics over everything––you call it 'experimental theology,' do you not? That is the correct term?"

Thalius nodded.

"The term in French is similar. That..." he sucked vehemently on the cigarette and tapped a centimeter of snaky ash into the rough palm of his hand. After pondering it he closed his fist upon the still-smouldering debris and sighed. "_Mille dieux!_" he muttered to himself. "In what capacity did you require my help? Oh, I don't know what service I may be able to render, I am not tenured..." He noticed that the Gitane was two-thirds gone and this seemed to vex him for some reason; he ground the stub of the cigarette out into the scarred blotter on his desk and took refuge in his leaves of inky numbers again. "How did you two meet?" he asked, moving the subject away from the painful thorny snare Everett had been caught in.

Thalius started, then stroked his cheek thoughtfully. "Well, what with him being a Cockney, and me being from Eireland, we were both outsiders in Brytish high society." He smiled wistfully. "We met under the vaults of Oxford's halls of higher learning. I'm a Humanities man––I haven't the familiarity with numbers that you and Everett share––and the academic circles we move in––" he paused, considering replacing "move" with "moved," but barrelled ahead defiantly, "––are just barely tangent. It was less about the intellectual and more of the...the emotional, the visceral." His cognac eyes widened and he clasped his hands tightly. "I have a duty towards him. I want to say to him, to telegraph to him through the ether, 'I'm coming, Everett, I'm coming, friend, I'm sending you a lifeline.' I want him to know I'm here."

The raw energy of the Cassington Scholar was effulgent. Damien could feel it starting to singe the skin of his face. This was something hotter than writing an atomcraft paper by the orange glare of Gauloises. "What do you...?" he trailed off.

"I've come because I'm going after him." Without waiting for the Professor's reaction, Thalius continued, "But before I do, I want to understand just what it is he said––what's got them all bent out of shape (the pious gits)––and know enough about it to find the intersection of experimental theology and Magisterial authority, the sweet spot that I will claim and that will give me access to Everett's," he swallowed, "cell."

With a clunk Damien introduced a bottle of vivid green liqueur to the desk and poured two scratched-up tumblers full.

"Absinthe?" Thalius asked curiously, peering at the burning emerald in his glass.

The professor looked over his shoulder. "_Ma foi!_ No, chartreuse. Drink up. I'll put some tea on."

"We have a busy night ahead of us," the porcupine said matter-of-factly, and shook out her quills.

A kettle piped over the bunsen burner, steam and scalding water bathed a strainer full of black tea, and the seeping tincture brewed. Thalius dumped the chartreuse into his teacup and mixed it in with a decidedly firm and steadfast air. The risks he ran in braving the Church and the possible consequences of his tea-chartreuse concotion going horribly wrong were one and the same; resolute, the Cassington Scholar was ready.

"Well," the Professor said, "We'd better get started."


	6. Chapter Six

_"When you're working in the dark, down below__  
Underneath St. James's park, down below__  
When you're working in the dark, oh it isn't half a lark,  
When you're working in the dark, down below  
It isn't hard to tell, down below  
If it's Bow or Clerkenwell, down below  
For Bow and Clerkenwell have a different sort of smell  
And we know them very well, down below."_

Everett wasn't much of a singer, but he warbled, nonetheless, in his thin baritone.

He'd been singing music hall doggerel all day. His spirits had been up ever since his encounter with the young flaxen-haired guard three days ago––

"Just think, Rhya!" he said. "Something to write with! Maybe he can bring me books, a lamp, matches––I can easily hide everything away in my rushes." He preferred to call his bed "rushes" rather than straw; it made it sound more like a medieval hall and less like a prison cell.

"Yes," she answered, fluffing her feathers hopefully. "But do be _cautious_, Everett––how can you trust any of these people in here..."

"I don't know," he said, still giddy, "but if there's a decent man in the College of St. Jerome, I think we've found him. Bless his soul, an _angel _must have sent him."

"You don't_ believe_ in angels," said Rhyalise tetchily.

"I don't _disbelieve_ in angels," said Everett, shrugging.

"Mercy, Everett, you're going soft in the head."

"I won't dispute that," Everett said, and began to caterwaul again. "_Over Covent Garden way, down below/In the merry month of May, down below/The fragrance of the flowers gives us many happy hours/And we sing a roundelay, down below/The objects that we find, down below/Help to entertain the mind, down below..._"

He didn't know what it was, but his imprisonment was making him miss London dreadfully. Constrained, immured, and helpless, he longed not for Oxford, but for home; wished not to be a Scholar, but to regress into his East End childhood. His father had been a right bastard, it was true; he remembered how Rhya would take the shape of a badger to protect them from the man's seething spotted skunk. His father had never struck him, no, but his dæmon had radiated such animosity--such malevolent psychic energy--that he may as well have. Still, how much more he would have preferred to be back in his tiny flat, his nose in a book during the blank peace that came when his father was hitting a bottle of gin, than where he was now, a captive.

"Now, the bloke with the scar on his nose brought breakfast today," said Everett. Counting on his fingers, he continued, "And he hadn't come for some days, either...maybe even before we met Michel. That means that they feed us in rotations of two––three? four? days." He looked at his dæmon and asked semi-rhetorically, for at least the eighth time that day, "How long till dinner, Rhya?"

"Approximately three seconds, I should think."

"Please, _Rhya_––"

Some minutes later there was a blot of dark and a _shlack_ in the lock.

"Speak of the devil! I guess this just _is_ our lucky day," said the owl.

After the door opened and that ever-brilliant light flooded in, Everett knew at once that it was the boy. The odds had been stacked pretty high that it would be somebody else, but there he was, with his sack and his lamp and his silver fox.

Despite her reservations, Rhyalise could not help leaping to Everett's shoulder and letting out a hoot of excitement.

"Hello," the guard said quietly. Everett greeted him with a subdued smile and a hand wave. He smoothed a spot next to himself to accomodate Michel, spreading out his blanket so that the soldier would not have to sit directly on the straw. "Did you bring––"

Michel's eyes flashed to meet his and he nodded; then, just as quickly, he looked away. He hid the sack with his body, slightly, and Everett couldn't tell if he did so consciously or not. It looked like a timid gesture, and Everett then understood that it was the others who might see that Michel was hiding the contraband from, not him. Impatient, Everett half-patted the blanket in spite of himself; Michel gave again a startled-deer look, but sat.

Everett reached for the sack. "May I?"

"Yes, go––go ahead," said Michel, and wiggled his boots nervously. Everett hastily undid the knot and drew open the bag. Nestled among the food, half-buried, were an oil pencil, a cheap cartridge pen, and a roll of paper. He carefully drew these out, then slid them inside the slip of his pillow.

"Don't worry," he said to Jeanneret. "They'll never know I have these." He wasn't at all sure he could deliver on that promise, but he heard himself saying the words anyway. He _meant _it, in any case, he thought. And that's what mattered. No one can see into the future; and intent is all a promise is––

His reverie was broken by the boy shifting restively. Everett cleared his throat purposefully and placed his palms on his knees.

"Aren't you––aren't you hungry?" asked Jeanneret. Everett laughed and peered inside the bag again.

"True enough. Good point." He pulled out a pot of beans and lumpy meat in a brown glop of some kind and began to eat. "So, what were you asking me?" he plied, his mouth full. Then he joked lightly, "This could use some salt."

"I asked why you...what you did to get here."

"Ah, right," Everett said casually, wiping his mouth. In truth, he remembered every detail of their prior conversation, but he wanted to keep the ball in his court. "Well," he continued, "In truth, I'm not really sure which of my writings it was that they arrested me for, but it was probably my treatise."

"When did they get you? Who _are_ you?"

"I was a Scholar at Gabriel College, in Oxford. You know? Oxford, in Ang––"

"I know where Oxford is," said Michel sharply. "I'm not daft."

"All right," Everett said hastily, piqued. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply you were––"

"Just get _on_ with it!" Michel said edgily. "I haven't got much time! Do you have any idea what they would do to me if they knew I were talking to you?"

"Yes, I think I can say that I do have _some_ idea," Everett said meekly, nursing the sores on one shackled wrist. "In fact I have the same concerns for you as you do for yourself, believe it or not. Here, take this bag––it's still got my bread in it. If you hear someone coming, pretend you're still giving it to me. Then, for the love of God––go!"

"Hey, that's a good idea," said Michel, mildly pleased.

Everett was heartened. He shoveled another spoonful of soup into his mouth and said, "Goodness, where do I start? Well, I was studying the behavior of particles, trying to understand the stuff of the universe, right, and I got into this field about 'strings'––"

"Are those like Rusakov particles?" asked Michel, almost inaudibly.

"Not quite," said Everett, without missing a beat, although he peered at Michel from beneath his eyelids. "More like, Rusakov particles are _made_ of strings. Everything is made of them, and that everything exists within four dimensions, plus _more_."

"_Four _dimensions?" said Michel, perplexed.

"Yes. You know, time."

"Time is a dimension?"

"Yes, indeed. And when you move, you describe not only a path in three dimensions, but something called a _world line_ in space-time. Your world line is your...it's your story. A story's events must each exist at a certain point in time, or they don't make sense. It's like your story––or like a ship's log, with the ship's location timestamped, so that it moves through both space and time, on a course that can be charted on a coordinate system."

"Time is a _dimension?_"

"You move through it, don't you? And things happen in it."

"Yes, but I thought it was something people had in their minds, something they used to measure things with! I thought it was just change," averred Michel.

"That is one school of thought," Everett conceded. "But further exploration has shown otherwise. History is the study of change. But change is tacked onto time, which is something all its own."

Michel pondered. "I understand the three spatial dimensions. But how are they _attached_ to time?"

"They're not _literally_ attached; none of the spatial dimensions are attached to one another, either. They're independent. But mathematically-speaking, there are relationships. Mathematically-speaking, time is hyperbolic-orthogonal to each dimension. This has to do with angles––"

"No math, no math! Say, am I supposed to know this? Have we gotten to the heresy yet?"

Everett laughed. "All this so far is strictly orthodox––in _my_ world. I don't know about yours. Far as I know, the Church doesn't really _know_ what it thinks about spacetime yet. But what that means is that it isn't _kosher_––as the Judæans say––yet, and thus not to be brought up in mixed company."

"I'll keep quiet about it, then. As if! Wait, how did we get here, anyway? Time and that?"

A star of adrenaline cracked apart in Everett's chest as he remembered uttering those same words in the interrogation room: _How did we get here?_ He thought hard. "I was telling you about the _more._"

Jeanneret hearkened. "Yes, that was it."

Everett folded his hands and rested them on one knee, then leaned back and looked up. "Other than four-dimensional spacetime, there is more. There are more dimensions––seven, say, or eight more."

"Why? What are we going to do with more?"

"Well, _we_ don't need them, but the universe does. We're trying to unify everything––right now there's fighting fields that both seem right––and having extra dimensions helps reconcile them."

"All right. Go on."

"Well, these dimensions have got to exist physically; but we don't notice them, right? So I proposed that they take up space, but not a lot––not a lot at all. What I think, see, is that they're compacted. Compactified, curled up, squished into spaces so tight you can't detect them. I know what you're probably wondering, right––a 'compacted dimension'? Here––" he reached into the pillowcase and retrieved a sheet of paper. He rolled it into a tube. "Pretend there's an ant here, moving along the surface of this tube." He dragged his fingertip along the lateral length of the cylinder. "And say this surface is infinite. The ant travels...and travels...and never returns to the same point, because the surface is a _flat_ dimension. Like our dimensions here." He waved an arm. "But," he continued, looking up eagerly, "if our intrepid formicid chooses instead to travel in the direction of curvature––that is to say, along the circumference of the tube––it will eventually return to the same point, because the dimension is _compactified_. Now," he mumbled, half in his own world, "around the time I was writing my treatise, there were some ideas germinating in other circles about an alternate way to posit these dimensions, something called _branes_, but it was rather nebulous as of my incarceration."

"And you were imprisoned for this? For saying there are more dimensions?" asked Jeanneret.

"Yes, I believe so. If that's not the case, well, then I'm even _more_ confused. Struth! Who knows?"

Serilda approached Rhyalise with one cautious paw.

"Why do they keep you chained up like that?" Jeanneret asked baldly.

Everett gave a wan smile. "Search me, lad. If I _knew_ what was going on in their heads, I wouldn't be here, would I?"

"But you're not _dangerous_, are you?"

Everett's face cracked in a helpless grin; he couldn't help himself.

Jeanneret felt a small spasm of guilt in the pit of his stomach. Was this some kind of mistake?

"Oh," said Everett, shifting gears, "I do wish that I'd at least been able to find out what the committee thought of my treatise."

"They've probably burned it by now," said Michel. "You _are_ here, after all."

"Of course they've burned it!" said Everett. "I meant that I wanted to know what they _thought_ of it." His temper rising, less towards Michel and more at the thought of how much he'd lost, he elaborated, "Scholars aren't like churchmen, they aren't _afraid!_ They don't throw things out on the spot because they're dangerous; they don't close their minds, they only _pretend_ to!"

"A den of heretics," Michel said, horrified.

"No. No!" Everett said frantically. "Don't you see? It's all about truth." Rhyalise reached forward and touched a wingfeather to the very tip of Serilda's claw.

A noise came from the corridor and they both froze.

"It's Pierre le Bœuf," Michel said airlessly. "It's his watch."

"Time to break out that bread, then," Everett replied in a whisper.

Jeanneret went through the motions of taking out the loaf and Everett quickly stuffed the roll of paper, which he was still holding, into the pillowcase.

As Michel rose to make his exit, Everett called out to him in a low voice. "Will you come back? I haven't any one to talk to. It's been just me and my dæmon for weeks and weeks, talking to ourselves." He smiled with innocently rakish charm and said, "And I promise you––the answer is no. I'm not dangerous."

Michel regarded his teacher appraisingly. Everett's devious smile faded to one of quiet, mournful sincerity.

"Thank you for the writing materials," said Everett.

"You're welcome," said Michel, and what he said startled him. "Thank you for teaching me." _I will not tell this at confession_, he decided, as he locked the door behind him and saluted Pierre with a movement of the head. He strode dow the hall with Serilda's tail high and counted the seconds of his world line as he beat its path across the stones.


End file.
